Five Floors of How a Continent Was Made

On the first floor of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, a section of the new exhibition Histórias Latino-Americanas is dedicated to quilombos, palenques, and cumbes — the autonomous communities built by enslaved people who escaped colonial captivity across Latin America. The section includes paintings, textile works, and archival material documenting these settlements in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and beyond. It is, in terms of square footage, a small part of a massive exhibition. In terms of argument, it is the centre of gravity.

MASP’s Latin American Histories opened on September 4th and occupies five floors of the Pietro Maria Bardi building on Avenida Paulista. The show brings together 187 works by 148 artists from 20 countries, curated by Amanda Carneiro and Julieta González, and organised into five thematic sections that trace how the idea of Latin America was constructed, contested, and remade over five centuries. It begins with colonisation — the violence, the extraction, the imposition of European visual regimes. It moves through the Baroque as a tool of colonial dissemination, through the myth of the tropical paradise, and into the twentieth-century collisions between modernity and indigenous knowledge. The fifth section addresses utopian traditions that emerged in response to authoritarianism: the art and politics of imagining otherwise.

The quilombo section sits inside that last thread, and it earns its weight because it reframes a familiar story. The transatlantic slave trade is well-documented. The abolition movements are well-known. What is less visible — in museum exhibitions, in school curricula, in the cultural imagination of the diaspora — are the communities that existed between captivity and formal freedom. Quilombos in Brazil, some of which lasted for centuries. Palenques in Colombia, one of which — San Basilio de Palenque — still exists and holds UNESCO recognition as the first free African community in the Americas. Cumbes in Venezuela. Maroon settlements in Jamaica, Suriname, and the Guianas. These were not hiding places. They were polities — with governance, agriculture, spiritual practice, and cultural production. They were, in the most literal sense, alternative societies built by people who refused the terms they were offered.

MASP’s decision to centre these communities inside an exhibition about Latin American identity is significant because it insists on something that the continent’s national narratives have often been reluctant to state plainly: that Afro-descendant people were not passengers in Latin America’s formation but architects of it. The quilombo is not a footnote to Brazilian history — it is a competing text. And the art that emerged from these communities, and from their descendants, is a competing aesthetic tradition that does not require validation from European modernism to hold its ground.

The exhibition arrives at a moment when MASP itself is shifting. Under Adriano Pedrosa — who curated the 2024 Venice Biennale and is now the museum’s artistic director — the institution has spent the last decade expanding its focus from European masterworks to Latin American, Afro-Atlantic, and indigenous production. The Histórias series, which has previously explored childhood, sexuality, Afro-Atlantic culture, ecology, and Brazilian history, now turns to the continent as a whole. It is the kind of institutional commitment — year-long, research-driven, occupying every floor — that most museums talk about but few deliver.

Five floors. Twenty countries. One question: who built this continent, and who gets to tell the story?

The List

1. MASP: Histórias Latino-Americanas — 148 artists from 20 countries across five floors of the Avenida Paulista museum. Colonialism, Afro-descendant resistance, indigenous knowledge, utopian alternatives. Running through 31 January 2027. The most ambitious exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere right now.
2. Lorenzo Pace: Never Forget Life and Art is to Play — At the Houston Museum of African American Culture, opened 11 September, through 10 December. The artist’s first institutional solo show — mixed-media textile work shown alongside quilts made by his mother Mary Alice Pace, placing his practice inside the broader tradition of Black quilt-making in America. An intergenerational conversation about inheritance and invention.
3. Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You — Opens 18 September at the Guggenheim, New York. Simon occupies the entire Rotunda with a new body of work: photographs, text, video, and sculpture in one installation. The Guggenheim at its most ambitious.
4. Cauleen Smith: Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted — At Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town. Running since November 2025, closing 4 October. Final weeks for the LA-based artist’s first major African presentation — short films, textile banners, jazz, and Afrofuturism. Last call.
5. Melbourne Fringe — Late September through October. Programming is being announced for one of Australia’s most important independent arts festivals. Over 450 events across the city — theatre, comedy, music, visual art, and experimental work by emerging artists.

What We’re Watching

The Pan-African Architecture Biennale closed in Nairobi on September 11th after five days that, by most accounts, delivered on the ambition of the opening announcement. Studios from across the continent showed work rooted in local materials, climate, and cultural memory. The Re:Paris Prize was awarded. Omar Degan’s curatorial vision — “Shifting the Centre: From Fragility to Resilience” — held. But the question now is what happens next. Biennales live or die by their second edition. The first is fuelled by novelty and goodwill. The second has to prove that the infrastructure can sustain the idea beyond a single week in a single city. Degan has said the biennale will rotate to a different African city in 2028, and the institutional logic of that rotation — refusing to fix the conversation in one capital — is both its most exciting proposition and its most expensive one. For now, what Nairobi proved is that the appetite exists. Architects came. Audiences came. The conversations were serious. Whether the funding and political will follow is the architectural problem that nobody exhibited.

The Calendar

Lagos

• King Kosoko: The Battle for Lagos · Cinemas citywide · Still screening
• Silent Book Club VI: Victoria Island · Victoria Island · September edition

Accra

• Gallery 1957 · Accra · Ongoing — check their September programme

Nairobi

• Post-PAB reflections · The inaugural Pan-African Architecture Biennale ended September 11th — the murals, installations, and conversations continue to resonate across the city

Johannesburg

• Homecoming: The Return of the JAG Collection · Standard Bank Gallery · Through 31 October · One of the continent’s most significant public art holdings
• Reverse Futures · Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation · Through 5 December

Cape Town

• Cauleen Smith: Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted · Zeitz MOCAA · Closing 4 October · Final weeks — if you haven’t been, the window is narrowing